By David Crystal

New from Cambridge University Press!

By Peter Mark Roget

This book "supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged … according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests."

Book Information

This book provides a detailed description of Esperanto for linguists whoare not familiar with the language. Its main aim is to demonstrate thatEsperanto not only has complex system of etymology and word formation, butalso of syntax and phraseology. Another aim is to determine to what extentthe language has extended beyond its original conception in 1887. This workpresents for the first time statistical and contextual analysis from arepresentative computer-based text archive using the latest techniques ofcorpus linguistics. Esperanto is an ideal object of study for linguistssince it is the most widespread and best known example of an artificiallanguage. In theory, Esperanto represents a regular, easily assimilatedlanguage designed for international use. Yet the language also came to beused socially among fellow enthusiasts, intellectually as a literary forumand politically for propaganda, especially in the communist era.Conservative estimates indicate 50,000 speakers, which is large by minoritylanguage standards. Yet Esperanto's status as a second language andideological project has only recently attracted socio-linguistic fieldwork(Stocker 1995) and the language has undergone almost no critical linguisticanalysis. Traditional descriptions point out that some syntactic elementsof Esperanto are a priori rational systems which resemble few otherlanguages, while most morpho-lexical elements are a posteriori and resembledonor languages such as Latin. Popular accounts of Esperanto rely on the'16 rules' which have led to the misconception that Esperanto has a minimalgrammar. However, in the natural development of the language some originalcreole-like characteristics have emerged beyond Zamenhof's original design.For example, the uncertainty over aspect or tense in verbs, the increasinguse of adverbs and prepositional-adverbs, or variable theme orientation incompound nouns. These processes are evidence of evolution in the language,although some have led to conflicts within the movement. There isparticular debate about the degree to which it is possibile to control thelanguage of what is essentially a discourse-community as well as a speechcommunity (Swales 1990). All these factors make the language difficult tocategorize according to traditional formulae. This volume outlines alinguistic description of the particularities of the language, from themorphosyntax to elements of phraseolgy. The description is based on acomputational analysis of a written text archive (a corpus of 350 000words). The corpus analysis reveals consistent patterns of phraseologywhich point to linguistic richness and dynamism. These patterns belie thereceivced wisdom that artificial languages cannot really display naturalcomplexity. [A version of this text in Esperanto can be seen on LINCOM'Sweb site]